It is generally acknowledged that people blind from birth develop supra-normal sensory abilities in order to compensate for their visual deficit. While extensive research has been done on the somatosensory and auditory modalities of the blind, information about their sense of smell remains scant. The goal of this study was therefore to understand olfactory processing in the blind at the behavioral and the neuroanatomical levels. Since blind individuals use their remaining senses in a compensatory way to assess their environment and since the olfactory system is highly plastic, it is likely to be susceptible to changes similar to those observed for tactile and auditory modalities. We used psychophysical testing and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neuronal substrates responsible for odor processing. Our data showed that blind subjects had a lower odor detection threshold compared to the sighted. However, no group differences were found for odor discrimination and odor identification. Interestingly, the OAS revealed that blind participants scored higher for odor awareness. Our fMRI data revealed stronger BOLD responses in the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, bilateral medio-dorsal thalamus, right hippocampus and left occipital cortex in the blind participants during an odor detection task. We conclude that blind subjects rely more on their sense of smell than the sighted in order to assess their environment and to recognize places and people. This is the first demonstration that the visual cortex of the blind can also be recruited by odorants, thus adding new evidence to its multimodal function.